


I've known too many men with too many faces (But there's always room for one more)

by CaptainJacq



Category: White Collar
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-23
Updated: 2012-04-23
Packaged: 2017-11-04 04:42:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/389860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaptainJacq/pseuds/CaptainJacq
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>June's never been a lone sheep in the middle of a wolf pack. What would any She-Wolf do but pick up the lost little puppy she finds one day?</p><p>Season One from June's POV, because she's BAMF and totally adopted Neal like a lost little puppy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I've known too many men with too many faces (But there's always room for one more)

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this ages ago. Like season 2 ages ago, and it took far longer to write than was necessary, but it's become one of my favourite fics.

One of the things June hates most about her age is the condescension she gets from people over the smallest things.

Age has not made her infirm or her senses in anyway dull. It wears away at her patience when she sees it coming, when the glint in her Granddaughter’s eyes glazes a little and she rephrases because Gramma is getting on, after all, and she can’t possibly understand everything these days. She hates it even more when her son-in-law stops her firm and picks up her suitcase or her daughter brings her husband with her ‘for all the heavy lifting.’

June knows there are things she can’t understand, objects she can’t move- but she’s not stupid. She’s not dull, or easily hoodwinked.

Neal knows that.

He learned it very quickly indeed, and he’s never forgotten. He’ll open the door for her wherever they go, but she knows that’s simply who he is. What she loves most about him is that he’ll wait for her to ask before he offers anything else. He takes care of her, but in a way her own children never can, purely because she’s their mother. Neal respects her.

That is possibly his greatest gift.

He's a con man and loves to take, loves to trick and lie, loves the facade, loves the game. He's Byron wrapped up in the 21st Century simultaneously lost in the romanticism of the world June loved in. Neal is a conundrum. He's young, but he has an old soul, he's seen more of the world than half the old women in June’s old book club. With Neal in her house, with his rousing history and his fierce pull he has her house buzzing and lively again in a way that she hasn’t felt since Byron was alive and it is _wonderful_.

Even as sad as the whole story is. Neal is an old soul in a young man’s body, and she knows the weight the old have. The burden the young man carries, and he carries it far too well; the lines in her old husbands suits straight and true, the pleats in his new just as clean. She knows the strain the boy has been through to be able to carry that off like there was nothing there at all.

But she knows the burden’s there.

She’s been living Neal’s game for far longer than the boy, long enough to know the markers, to see the glint in his eyes, the offset in his shoulders, the way he carries himself, the way he smiles. She knows them all, better than he does, in all likely.

She knows.

The first night he stays in the spare room he spends most of it outside, staring out at New York. She sits with him until midnight rolls around before she retires herself, but she’s just as entranced with the awkward little conman she picked up at the end of the road as he is with the city that has moved on without him. He’s a little lopsided, his skills out of touch with the way the world works. He offers her a different smile when she bows out for bed than he did when she mentioned her spare room. It’s a touch more genuine and in that unspoken rule between grifters she knows he’s saying _thankyouthankyouthankyou_ a million times over and swearing that he owes her. She knows, because it’s the same look Byron had on his face when he got out the first time and she let him back into the house. It’s a bit like looking back forty years and for the first time since the house was empty, June sleeps properly; she doubts Neal does. She doubts he sleeps at all.

In the time Neal’s parole is temporary, he tells her little things, like what he was convicted for. That he swears by the little odd man who turned up on her doorstep and asked, oh so politely, to wait. He thanks her again and she pats him on the shoulder and doesn’t answer. He tells her that he’s afraid of going back, not in words but in the tiny looks and the way he sits and stares hungrily out over the city, as far as the eye can see, like it’s the last time he’ll see it.

When he wanders home the afternoon after she wakes to find her Jag missing and Neal’s precious bottle on her side table, she knows that he’s gone and finished whatever the Bureau have had him doing. He stands in her hallway, staring up at the stairs and he looks weary. There’s more tension in his shoulders than the afternoon before and she takes a single look at him and then pulls out the good wine. Neal only drinks a glass, she has two. He’s been in prison for four years after all. If he’d had any resistance to liquor at all she wouldn’t have hesitated with the bourbon.

The morning after the FBI catch the Dutchman she finds Peter Burke on her doorstep. She nods him up to where Neal has been leaning on the balcony since the sun rose, and when he leaves without his charge she sighs with relief and knows well enough that Neal’s desperation has won out.

It surprises her a little at just how much of a relief she actually finds it.

When she wanders up to the terrace fifteen minutes later Neal is staring down at the FBI identification on the table in front of him.

She doesn’t say anything and Neal waits for her to sit down before he looks up.

“We’ll need to organise a proper tailor for all those suits,” she says and Neal startles. She hides a smile. Oh so quick to think himself a burden.

“Seven hundred a month doesn’t cover what you’ve given me, June,” he says and she hears the underlying question. She ignores it. She hears the underlying _thankyouthankyouthankyou_ once again. She ignores that too.

“I think it’ll do just fine, dear,” she says and he reaches out to hold her hand. He stares down at their linked fingers and his expression shifts and changes and he looks tired when he glances back up at her. He’s been on edge since Peter Burke let him out, savoring every moment of possible freedom. Now, now he has assurance it’s not over yet.

She knows she’d be exhausted too.

“Get some sleep, dear,” she says with a gentle smile, patting his hand still resting over her other. He nods, a weary smile still on his face.

“I will,” he says, but she knows he won’t. It’s got nothing to do with being a conman; it’s got everything to do with being a stubborn man.

Byron was like that too.

It’s a careful evolution of the conman she witnesses over the following weeks. She can’t help but think he’s thinking too hard, splitting himself too thin and unsure about how much he has to give away and how much he has already. He told her everything she asked him that first night and the careful absences of detail she let him keep. Most of them, anyway. She knows con men, she has all her life and she was never a lone sheep in the middle of a wolf pack. She knows the life, knows the burdens, and she can see the weight of them on the little conman she picked up down the road. A part of her can’t help but laugh when she thinks of it like picking up a stray, but in many ways, that’s exactly what Neal is, and so that part of her quietens. She knows the harsh taste of suddenly having to fit into a world you’d never belonged, shackled - if the word fit - to the constraints of normal society and feeling horribly alone.

  
That familiarity is probably what loosens her tongue. She’s not sure at the time, but when Neal tells her about Kate, she recognizes the pride for what it is, and she knows Neal feels a little safer, a little more secure. He’s a little reluctant at first. A little unsure, but the passion behind him makes her heart ache for him.

But first, weeks before it comes to that, she tells him about Byron.

She finds him awake at the kitchen table one night, sitting slumped in the chair with his thoughts a million miles away and a black and white photograph resting just under his fingers. She sits down next to him and he looks at her with wide bright blue eyes and he doesn’t say a word, but his body speaks for him. Even after she settles he’s tense and in the moment she starts talking June knows she’s taking pity on him. But a part of her is glad to have the chance to tell him their story. She tells him a story about a cheeky boy who once tricked four other boys to clear the competition for a fleeting chance at a slow waltz. She tells him a story of a boy who picked pockets and rigged dice and card games by night, but by day worked in the tailors just across the way for months and months on end so the first house he bought her was genuine and honest, just like every flower or every necklace or coat, every gift paid for out of his nimble fingers working honest graft. He worked hard so every gift he gave was as genuine as his love for her, until the day she found his midnight poker game and forced her way in. She won three hands that night, and that cheeky boy spilled all his secrets and let her pick and choose what to hold against him.

Neal doesn’t tell her anything that night, but he listens, he listens, hungry for every word, staring at her with his large blue desperate eyes and a slouch in his shoulders.

It takes a month, but she finds him in the same place one night and she knows this time he’s ready. This time he talks.

She hears about a boy who had spent so long fighting for a life he thought he could have, only to have it fall out from under him and shatter. She listens to his story about a kid who still had no idea when - even years later - a quirky man took him under his wing and on their first big con he met a girl he fell in love with on the spot. He tells her about the fact that when that girl finally kissed him back, when they made love and she touched him and held him she called him Nick and for the longest time in his life he knew exactly what he wanted to be. He tells her about the con that fell through and the way he’d known she was forever when she’d looked at him as Neal Caffrey and not turned away. He tells her about a romance that seemed to burst and burn and then vanish and how desperate he’d been to show her he loved her. He tells her about a boy who ran around the world trying to prove he could be anything his girl wanted him to be. He could find her anything she wanted, he could take it, own it, fake it, force it – anything at all.

She just had to say.

He tells her about a boy who knew what was coming and ran into it anyway. He tells her about a boy who only wanted one thing, and how it had never really been his. The closest it had been, the longest, had been once a week between plexiglass and microphones. He tells her about hope, about desperation about trust and June has never in her life felt so lucky for everything her life has accomplished.

That night Neal tells her about a boy tired of searching for everything he was meant to be.

It’s a story neither of them mention. She watches him come and go after that, and she watches the sparks between him and his FBI comrade. She watches the push and pull of his former life and the constant dangling taste of the happily every after he’s always been after but is still so firmly out of reach. She watches and she waits and hopes that he’ll meet her downstairs again and they’ll tell another story, but it doesn’t happen. His door is always open to her, and a part of her knows that courtesy is part of Neal’s constant thankyou to her. That and he knows that the life never escapes you; she’s been out of it as much as she can for decades now, but through Neal she can taste it and it’s brilliant. As brilliant and vibrant as it had always been and she knows Neal understands that lure it always there, lurking. The door is always open, and his con man’s smile never fades, and she knows he understands that part of her still bursting for the fight, because his schemes never stop, Mozzie comes and goes and the smile gets brighter and bolder and he’s a boy as much in the game as he is tethered outside of it. She knows Neal understands because if he didn’t, his schemes wouldn’t step foot inside her house. His courtesy extends much further than his sense, really.

She knows he understands that you can’t really ever escape the life, but it doesn’t stop him hoping. It doesn’t stop him wishing and, in the end, it doesn’t stop him from running when the chance is there.

When he looks at her, months later, when he leans in to kiss her cheek and says ‘ _thankyou, June,_ ’ she knows he won’t be coming back. She knows that today is the day he finally gets his Kate back. That he can finally settle and whether it’s to pretend, or whether he now finally knows who he is and that he can’t run, she doesn’t find out. What she does know is that this last thankyou is a goodbye.

She grasps his arm for a moment and she smiles and for the briefest of seconds neither of them do or say a thing, the old con man’s wife and a con man all his own, the pair of them with one foot in and out the door. June takes her initiative and leaves, pulling the door shut behind her, hoping that the vibrant lure of the old world can be dealt with just as easily. She knows that going back to solitude and obedience will not be as simple, she’s no fool, but she doesn’t get the chance to fight it, either.

She is not prepared when she finds Peter Burke on her doorstep that night.

At least, not with the expression on his face that he has.

“I couldn’t stop them,” he says and for a moment she thinks that Neal did it, he made his break for freedom, but then Peter keeps talking and its so very, very different than she had been hoping.

“The plane blew up, Kate’s gone, and I couldn’t stop them. He’s been taken into custody. There’s nothing I can do.”

It’s not often she’s had such a horrible conversation on her doorstep. She opens the door and Peter shuffles in, she finally sees how weary he is, his clothes are smoke grey and his eyes are haunted. She wonders briefly how much he has seen, how much poor Neal has seen on the day he thought he was getting his happily ever after. She makes herself stop.

“Is he alright?” she asks, knowing that he must be far from it. But still, she has to ask. Peter shakes his head.

“He was walking towards the plane, I stopped him. She was right there. A few yards away on the tarmac. He didn’t get to touch her. The plane blew up; I could see her in the window behind him. He – “ Peter stops and June thanks the higher powers he does. She suddenly feels as old and weary as she’s never been.

“Neal made a deal with OPR. You know it?”

June nods.

“They don’t care. He’s been taken back – “ Peter’s voice cracks, just a bit and he stops again.

“I don’t know when he’ll get out.”

“His room is always waiting, Peter. No matter how long it takes.” Her voice sounds fierce in her own ears, but in that moment it’s strangely akin to losing Byron all over again. All she could think about after her eldest had told her the news was think of him young and charming and cheeky, all done up in his fabulous suits, and in that moment, Neal and Byron’s smiles are the same; the suits are exactly, the timelessness about them is, too. In that moment she doesn’t quite know what it is she’s been doing with her life.

Peter breaks the nostalgia as he nods and lets out a long sigh.

“Thankyou June, for taking him in.”

“It’s been my pleasure. Every damn minute.” Her voice is strong and doesn’t waver for a second. It’s an odd sound in her ears.

“Now promise me you’ll bring him back here, Agent Burke, when you get him back again.”

“As soon as I can, Mrs Ellington.”

He nods himself out and she watches the car disappear from the front window and for the first time in months and months, the house feels empty.

She calls Mozzie twenty minutes later and he tells her to sit tight.

He’s dressed in a suit when he shows up several hours later, and the look in his eyes tells her everything she needs to know.

They break out the good scotch and Mozzie sleeps on Neal’s couch.

It’s almost like nothing has changed, except everything has.

The next week she visits her youngest daughter in Chicago because she can’t stand the silence.

When she gets back, Neal is still put away, Mozzie is concerned, Peter is at a loss as the boy refuses to sign himself free again.

She leaves it another week before she goes to see him. He shuffles in and smiles, bright and wide and as careful as she’s never seen him. She tells him another story, about a boy with a second chance and how the ends of the world were no match for him and his heart of gold. He barely says a thing, and when she leaves it’s with the threat to not make her have to see him again.

Two days later Mozzie calls, he’s signed the papers and come Tuesday next, the flat upstairs will once again be full with the conman with the old smile.

June sits on her terrace that night, and toasts the bright city lights, and her family of con men.


End file.
